Category: Senior Design

MTU Team Among Winners of TiM$10K Challenge

Group of five team members.
L-R: Brian Parvin, Paul Allen, David Brushaber, Alex Kirchner, and Kurtis Alessi

A Michigan Tech team is among the winners of the SICK Inc. TiM$10K Challenge. For the second year, students from universities around the country were invited to participate in the challenge, designed to support innovation and student achievement in automation and technology.

For the competition, teams were supplied with a 270-foot SICK LiDAR sensor and accessories, and challenged to solve a problem, create a solution or bring a new application to any industry that utilizes the SICK LiDAR.

The Tech team members — Brian Parvin, Kurtis Alessi, Alex Kirchner, David Brushaber and Paul Allen — earned Honorable Mention (fourth place overall) for their project, Evaluating Road Markings (the Road Stripe Evaluator). The innovative product aims to help resolve issues caused by poor road markings while reducing maintenance costs and improving motorist safety.

Each team was asked to submit a video and paper for judging upon completion of its project. A panel of judges decided the winning submissions based on creativity and innovation, ability to solve a customer problem, commercial potential, entrepreneurship of the team, and reporting.

“This was a unique project in that the team was required to identify a problem and develop a solution to it that is based on SICK’s TiM LiDAR — most teams are handed a problem and asked to create a solution,” said team advisor Tony Pinar, senior design coordinator in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “I think this format allowed the team to exercise even more innovation than a ‘typical’ project.”

Pinar said the team was well organized and demonstrated an excellent work ethic from day one. “It was exciting to watch them identify a salient problem and develop a functional proof-of-concept solution despite the setbacks that affected us all after spring break,” he said.

SICK is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of sensors, safety systems, machine vision, encoders and automatic identification products for industrial applications.

FWF: News from Week 13

Casey Strom, 2017 Carl J. Schjonberg Award for Outstanding ECE Undergraduate Student, along with his wife Becky
Casey Strom, 2017 Carl J. Schjonberg Award for Outstanding ECE Undergraduate Student, along with his wife Becky

Welcome to a special double feature edition of FWF. I am playing catch-up this weekend, in my attempts to write one column per week, not always successful. This is the busiest time of the year at Michigan Tech, so there is plenty to write about, but sometimes doing stuff gets in the way of writing about it.

The week of April 10-14 is “Week 13” in the spring academic calendar. In the ECE Department, this is when the students wrap up their Senior Design and Enterprise projects and make their final presentations, on Thursday. Simultaneously, the ECE External Advisory Committee (EAC) is in town, from Wednesday afternoon to Friday noon. The timing of the EAC visit is no coincidence, as their primary mission in the spring meeting is help us judge the student presentations. The entire ECE faculty gets into the act as well, sitting in on the presentations and offering their feedback. For all of Thursday morning, from 8am to 1pm, we listened to student teams of 4-6 describe their various projects. Collectively we watched 26 different presentations spread out over 5 time slots and 6 venues.

My overall impression this year is that the presentations were quite good; there seems to be a gradual improvement in the quality of the oral communication skills and the level of comfort our students have with public speaking. If I were to have a concern, it would be that I wonder if we are doing enough to challenge our students with the electrical and computer engineering technical content. All of our Senior Design projects are industry-sponsored, and many of the Enterprise projects are as well. We are of course very proud of our relationships with our industry partners, and seek to do everything we can to ensure that they get the value they seek from supporting our educational programs. The trick is making sure that those needs include tough, interesting, electrical/computer engineering problems that require a concerted effort for several months on the part of our students to find a viable solution. The EAC echoed these concerns in our debriefing session on Friday, and it is something we will be taking a close look at next year.

As is to be expected there is a range of quality in the student projects, and the best ones are absolutely outstanding. Each year the EAC awards the Larry Kennedy Industry Innovation Award to the project they deem to be the very best. The award is named in honor of our recent EAC chair who was taken from us suddenly by a heart attack, two years ago, at a far too young age. This year’s award goes to the project titled “Surgical High Speed Drill Rotor Position via CAN bus” sponsored by the Stryker Corporation. Stryker is a medical device and equipment company headquartered in SW Michigan; this is their first Senior Design project in the ECE Department. The ECE faculty advisor is Trever Hassell and the Stryker point of contact is Keith Behnke, whom we also welcome to the EAC this year. The students on the team are Dan Bragg, Elliott Meese, Julio Saint-Felix Rodriguez, Hailey Trossen, and Yuguang Wang. My congratulations to everyone involved in the project – in terms of the scope of the project and the quality of the execution this is exactly what we hope for every year.

Senior Design Team 6 (Stryker) L-R: Julio Saint-Felix Rodriguez, Hailey Trossen, Elliott Meese, and advisor Trever Hassell. Missing from photo: Dan Bragg and Yuguang Wang
Senior Design Team 6 (Stryker) L-R: Julio Saint-Felix Rodriguez, Hailey Trossen, Elliott Meese, and advisor Trever Hassell. Missing from photo: Dan Bragg and Yuguang Wang

The award for best capstone project is just one of several awards given out at our Senior Banquet, which occurred the evening of Thursday, April 13, with student, faculty, and EAC members in attendance.

This year for the first time we recognized the many undergraduate students who serve the ECE Department in various capacities, some paid and some volunteer. These include participating in Fall Open House and Spring Preview days, telephone calling campaigns for student recruiting, departmental tours, and our Undergraduate Advisory Board. Some 18 students were presented with certificates. This community service by our students is highly valued and greatly appreciated by the department, and the recognition is long overdue. I plan to continue doing this at the Senior Banquet from here on out.

Recognition of Service to ECE
Recognition of Service to ECE

The Departmental Scholar Award is our departmental nominee for the Provost’s Award for Scholarship, given to a student who will be senior ranked in the following academic year, and who represents the very best in scholarship and leadership at Michigan Tech. The ECE Departmental Scholar for the 2016-2017 academic year is Sarah Wade, a double major in electrical engineering and computer engineering with an outstanding academic record and long list of extracurricular activities including being on the Nordic ski team. Sarah is a member of the Aerospace Enterprise, hosted in the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics and is making significant contributions there as a systems engineering and technical lead. Many of our award-winning students over the years have been associated with the Aerospace Enterprise so they must be doing something right over there. Like all but one of the Departmental Scholars at Michigan Tech, Sarah did not win the Provost’s Award, but the competition was stiff and we were proud to have her represent ECE.

Sarah Wade, 2017 ECE Departmental Scholar
Sarah Wade, 2017 ECE Departmental Scholar

The Woman of Promise Award was created by the Presidential Council of Alumnae, an advisory group to President Mroz. It is intended to recognize those women at Michigan Tech who go “above and beyond” what is expected in terms of being a well-rounded student, with considerations of academic achievement, campus leadership, citizenship, and creativity. This year the ECE Department had such outstanding nominees that we decided to give two Woman of Promise Awards. The first went to Jenna Burns, a high-achieving electrical engineering major with a minor in Spanish, who also is a percussion section leader in the Pep Band, and who has really distinguished herself in service to the ECE Department. Our second Woman of Promise is Elizabeth “Libbey” Held, a double major in electrical and computer engineering, a minor in Spanish (is there a theme here?), and a near-perfect GPA. Libby was cited by several faculty members as someone who asks the most insightful questions in class and during office hours. My congratulations to both Jenna and Libbey. Both have a year to go, so I say keep up the good work!

Jenna Burns, 2017 ECE Woman of Promise
Jenna Burns, 2017 ECE Woman of Promise

Elizabeth (Libbey) Held, 2017 ECE Woman of Promise
Elizabeth (Libbey) Held, 2017 ECE Woman of Promise

Our top student achievement award is the Carl S. Schjonberg Award for the Outstanding Undergraduate Student in the ECE Department. This year’s award choice was in my opinion a slam-dunk and I made that opinion known during our faculty deliberations, which I usually stay out of. Casey Strom is a truly remarkable individual. He is what we would call a “non-traditional” student, meaning that he comes to our program with a fair amount of life experience already under his belt. He lives and works on a family farm in Calumet, has a large family already, and had his own surveying business at the time of his coming into the department. In spite of all these demands on his time, he completes all of his coursework in the ECE Department with near-perfect attendance, all homeworks completed on time, and many exams close to 100%. This guy is motivated like you wouldn’t believe, and on top of that he has the most cheerful can-do demeanor of any student I have ever met. Casey, you represent the best of everything we try to do in the ECE Department and I couldn’t be prouder to call you a Michigan Tech graduate.

Casey Strom, 2017 Carl J. Schjonberg Award for Outstanding ECE Undergraduate Student
Casey Strom, 2017 Carl J. Schjonberg Award for Outstanding ECE Undergraduate Student

The final award of the evening at the Senior Banquet is presented by the students in Eta Kappa Nu to their selection for the Professor of the Year. This year’s award goes to Duane Bucheger. Duane is our Professor of Practice who runs the Senior Design program and teaches courses in design fundamentals, electric circuits, and electronics. He has been in this position for six years, and during that time he has done an outstanding job of building up our space and equipment devoted to Senior Design on the 7th floor of the EERC. As anyone in the ECE Department can tell you, Duane is a strong and vocal advocate for making sure students are aware of what will be expected of them in industry, and for preparing them to enter that world. I am delighted to see the Eta Kappa Nu students recognize Prof. Bucheger for his efforts on their behalf; I think it is a fitting tribute for all his hard work. For a variety of reasons and by mutual agreement, Duane will be stepping down from this position at the end of the academic year. We wish him all the best and thank him for his many contributions to the ECE Department.

Duane Bucheger, HKN Professor of the Year, presented by Libbey Held
Duane Bucheger, HKN Professor of the Year, presented by Libbey Held

All of that was almost two weeks ago! One more post and I will be caught up – and maybe the snow will be gone.

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

Fridays with Fuhrmann: It’s a great time to be an ECE!

ECE Woman of Promise, Alexis Dani, presented by ECE chair Dan Fuhrmann
ECE Woman of Promise, Alexis Dani, presented by ECE chair Dan Fuhrmann

Happy Tax Day everyone! Actually the real Tax Day this year isn’t until Monday, and that’s a good thing considering how busy things have been in the ECE Department this week. Here’s a little factoid I just learned this week: April 15 is the birthday of Swiss mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Leonhard Euler (1707). Everyone knows Euler’s Formula, right?

This is the time when all our seniors are wrapping up their Senior Design and Enterprise projects, and we have a lot of visitors in town to see what we are doing and to help us out with the evaluation of the projects.

The ECE External Advisory Committee, or EAC, is here for the Spring 2016 meeting. This is a group of about a dozen industry representatives, most of them Tech alumni, who visit us twice a year to help us in our quest for continuous improvement. A lot of their time in the spring meeting is devoted to judging Senior Design and Enterprise projects, which happened yesterday (Thursday April 14). We had a total of 24 projects this year, and each project team is required to present their results and field questions in a 45-minute session. All of the ECE faculty and the graduate student TAs also participated in the judging. This is a great day in the life of the ECE Department, when we get to see all the hard work of the students over four years brought to fruition. My thanks to everyone, especially the EAC, that helped make the day a success.

We concluded the day with the Senior Awards Banquet at the Memorial Union Ballroom. Here we recognize both individuals and teams for their outstanding contributions to the ECE Department.

The individual student award winners are:

ECE Woman of Promise / Martha Sloan Scholarship: Alexis Dani (pictured above)
ECE Departmental Scholar: Derek Gheller
Carl S. Schjonberg Outstanding Senior: Ian Cummings

Derek Gheller, ECE Departmental Scholar
Derek Gheller, ECE Departmental Scholar

Ian Cummings, Carl S. Schjonberg ECE Outstanding Senior
Ian Cummings, Carl S. Schjonberg ECE Outstanding Senior

The Larry Kennedy Industry Innovation Award, the award given by the EAC to the top design project in the department, went to Senior Design Team 8, Traveling Wave Fault Location, sponsored by American Transmission Company (ATC) with faculty advisor John Lukowski.

L-R:  ATC's Joe Kysely, SD8 members Jacob Marshall and Kevin Schoenknecht (Troy Johnston not pictured), SD assistant/ECE PhD student Dustin Drumm, and team advisor Prof. John Lukowski
L-R: ATC’s Joe Kysely, SD8 members Jacob Marshall and Kevin Schoenknecht (Troy Johnston not pictured), SD assistant/ECE PhD student Dustin Drumm, and team advisor Prof. John Lukowski

Finally, the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) Professor of the Year award was given to Senior Lecture Kit Cischke. Kit teaches many of the core courses in our computer engineering program, and is the faculty advisor for the Wireless Communications Enterprise. He does a fabulous job and all the students love him. Congratulations Kit, and thanks for all you do!

Professor of the Year, Senior Lecturer Kit Cischke, presented by HKN's Matthew Andres
Professor of the Year, Senior Lecturer Kit Cischke, presented by HKN’s Matthew Andres

Earlier in the week we had a visit from another “unofficial” advisory group – a group of 5 industry leaders and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, led by Brocade CEO Dave House. Dave has been a very good friend of the ECE Department for many years, and in fact you may recognize his name from the professorship that I hold. Dave and company were here to advise and encourage the entire university, not just the ECE Department, on matters of innovation, entrepreneurship, and where technology is headed from their point of view. Dave has been very influential on my thinking about the importance of building closer ties among the ECE Department, the Department of Computer Science, and the School of Technology. On Tuesday I was very pleased to be able to report to the group that the performance results in the new Institute of Computing and Cybersystems, measured in new research awards, research expenditures, publications, and student support, was much higher than expected. The ICC is the most significant effort arising from the joint activity of the three units mentioned above, and so it is gratifying to see things coming together as they are.

On top of all that, we had some fantastic news from the ECE faculty this week. Assistant Professors Durdu Guney, Timothy Havens, and Chee-Wooi Ten have all been recommended by the Provost for promotion to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure. The final vote will be taken at a meeting of the Board of Trustees in two weeks’ time. My congratulations to Durdu, Tim, and Chee-Wooi on reaching this major milestone – we expect many great things from them in the years to come.

All for now. Get those taxes in!

– Dan

Daniel R. Fuhrmann
Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

Presentation Day for ECE Senior Design and Enterprise teams

SD2015This Thursday, April 14, 2016, will be a huge day for students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Senior Design and Enterprise programs. Not only will they participate in Michigan Tech’s Design Expo, but they will also make their final presentations for the year to ECE faculty, staff, students, and the department’s External Advisory Committee.  To see a complete list of teams, including a description of the projects, see: presentation schedule.

Please feel free to attend any or all presentations and good luck to our teams!

 

 

Fridays with Fuhrmann – Teamwork without Borders

Google_2015_logo5I am writing today from beautiful Boulder, Colorado, where I have been attending a research progress review on a project I have been working on, along with other Michigan Tech faculty and students.  The project is sponsored by Google.  Michigan Tech is fortunate to be a research partner with Google on something they call a Multi-University Research Agreement, or MURA.  I can’t tell you the technical details of what we are doing, yet, but later this year everything will be made public.

Having observed how this project is managed over the past year, I am struck by how much the workplace, the team organizations, and the expectations of engineers have changed over the years.  This has been a great experience for me, not only because the work is interesting but because it gives me a glimpse of what our graduates can expect as they enter the workforce.

One of the most remarkable things I have noticed is how collaboration tools have made the world a smaller place, and have made geographical differences practically irrelevant.  The team working on this project, about 30 people all together, comprises full-time Google employees, independent contractors, engineering companies, and university teams like ours from Michigan Tech.  The group is spread out from Hawaii, to California, to Michigan, and to Europe.  Subsets of the team meet regularly via Google Hangout, which is a pretty easy-to-use teleconferencing tool, and it is like being in the same room (there is the one remaining issue of time zones, but most people don’t have a big problem with it.)   Even when most of the group gets together in the same city, like this week, there are still those who call in and contribute.

The success or failure of this project (and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be successful) depends on the ability of all the participants to work together as a team.  This week we had discussions about how things went in 2015, and the overall consensus was that the teamwork was pretty good.  It reminds me of why it is so important for us at Michigan Tech to teach our students about teamwork in our capstone projects, whether in Senior Design or Enterprise.  They are going to be working on teams when they leave the university, and knowing how to collaborate, how to get along, how to get work done on time, how to communicate, how to make expectations clear for others – these are all things that are going to be critical skills for career success.  The other side of teamwork that we stress at Michigan Tech is the development of individual skills.  Everyone on this Google project has a seat at the table because they are really good at what they do, and I don’t imagine that’s going to be any different anywhere else.

Finally, I will mention that the nature of engineering careers is changing rapidly.  Certainly there will be those that work full-time for a large corporation, and maybe they stay with that corporation a long time.  On the other hand, there are those that work for corporations, but change jobs often.  Others work as independent contractors, coming and going from teams as their skills are needed.  I am fascinated by these engineers, at least the ones I have seen in this group: they are extraordinarily talented in their particular area of expertise, and because of all the collaboration tools available today they can live wherever they want.   In all of these cases I am just talking about engineers selling their time and expertise; I haven’t begun to talk about entrepreneurship, which is another avenue that engineers are increasingly exploring.  The bottom line is, if an engineer is good at what he or she does, their career arc and their lifestyle is limited only by the imagination.

At Michigan Tech we do our best to prepare students for this new engineering environment of the 21st century.  I am always open to feedback about how well we are doing.

Being able to travel to meetings like this has its perks.  On Friday, when this is posted, I’ll be taking a vacation day and skiing at Loveland Pass, in the Rocky Mountains not too far Denver.  Finally, I have a chance to see if all my time spent on Mont Ripley has done me any good!

– Dan

Dan Fuhrmann, Dave House Professor and Chair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Michigan Technological University

 

Fridays with Fuhrmann – ECE Undergraduate Programs

ECE Undergraduate Teaching Labs

Winter break is over and the spring semester is underway at Michigan Tech – “spring” being a euphemism in Houghton for snow up to our eyeballs.  I thought it might be a good time to write a few words about our undergraduate educational programs.
In the ECE Department we are all about teamwork and team projects.  Our Senior Design program is a well-oiled machine with about 10 projects going each year, real industrial projects with real industrial financial support.  Our Enterprise program, an alternative path to completion of the capstone design requirement, is unique to Michigan Tech; it gives students the opportunity to form their own virtual companies and work on projects that have longevity across semesters and across multiple personnel.  Of course, we are not alone in this approach.  All ECE Departments across the country recognize the importance the team-based design projects, as do the employers that hire new graduates every year. It is also a critical piece of everyone’s  ABET accreditation.
What distinguishes Michigan Tech from many other institutions is our philosophy in the early part of the curriculum.  We believe very strongly that the best path to becoming a valuable team member is to develop individual skills.  I don’t think this is particularly controversial, and is unquestioned in other fields of human endeavor.  Think of an orchestra, for example – every player has to know the technical aspects of playing his or her instrument, and enough music theory to understand what is going on.  Or, think of a baseball team, where everyone has honed their skills in throwing, catching, and batting, and they know all the rules of the game.  In both analogies, people bring their individual and diverse skills to the table, which makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts.
So it is in electrical and computer engineering.  This is a wonderful and exciting field, with teams of people in major corporations and in small start-up companies changing the world every day through their ingenuity and innovation.  The engineers who are going to make the biggest contributions are the ones who put in the effort early on to get really good at what they are doing.  This needs to happen when students are young enough, and their brains are malleable enough, to learn new material with some degree of permanence – like playing the violin or learning to water ski.  Author and social observer Malcolm Gladwell has pointed out that it takes about 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, and the 10,000 hours is about what you get by working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for 5 years – in other words, a college education.  In the ECE Department we emphasize individual skills in both the mathematical and scientific fundamentals of electricity and electronics, and in the laboratory.
Our required sophomore electronics laboratory is a prime example. Each lab bench has exactly one chair in front of it. When I was interviewing for this position and getting a tour of the facilities, it was one of the first things I noticed, without anyone telling me.  I was blown away by the elegance and simplicity of this approach to laboratory education.  Each student is required to learn how to use the equipment and how to carry out the experiments, on their own, human against the machine.  Not everyone is happy with this approach at first – not everyone is happy with two-a-day football drills either – but in the end I would be very surprised if any of our graduating seniors ever told me it was a bad idea.
We take a similar approach on the mathematical side of things.  I teach a one-credit course to freshman called Essential Mathematics for Electrical Engineering.  The scope is quite limited but I cover a few things that I think are critical in electrical engineering that don’t show up as much in other engineering disciplines – sinusoids, exponentials, complex numbers, complex exponentials, phasors, that sort of thing.  Basically I want them to know Euler’s formula and what it means. (In fact, every semester I tell students that if they see me around town and can produce Euler’s formula from memory I will buy them whatever beverage they are old enough to drink.  This has actually happened.)  The course is pass-fail, and to complete the course the students have to pass an old-fashioned paper-and-pencil exam with no books, no notes, no nothing.  The pass threshold is 70%, which is pretty draconian, but I give them up to three chances to pass it, kind of like a driver’s test.  Again, this is consistent with our philosophy that there are few things that all EEs simply need to know cold, and there’s no getting around it.
Our goal is to set every student on a path where they can realize their greatest potential, whatever that looks like to them.  We think that by instilling individual skills in younger students, and then putting students together as they mature so they can learn how contribute those skills in a team environment, is the best way to do that.  So far it seems to be working.
– Dan Fuhrmann, Chair, ECE

Follow ECE on Social Media

MTU_ECE_smphotoThe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is now on Facebook and Twitter. Like and follow us for faculty spotlights, student accomplishments, outreach and events, industry and alumni news, and more; including a weekly post from the chair in “Fridays with Fuhrmann”. We hope you’ll add us to your social media picks.

ECE Annual Report 2015

ECE Annul Report 2015
ECE Annul Report 2015

We are happy to share with you our newly released ECE Annual Report 2015. A look back at our past year highlights research activities by Profs. Zhaohui Wang, Wayne Weaver, Bruce Mork, and Mike Roggemann, along with ECE’s involvement in Michigan Tech’s new research agreement with Google ATAP. Once again the year included a wide variety of hands-on student projects in our Senior Design and Enterprise programs and we thank our sponsors for making it all possible! Our undergraduate programs added two new concentrations starting Fall 2015 – Biomedical Applications and Environmental Applications within the Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. We invite you to read about these stories and more. From all of us at ECE, best wishes for 2016!

ECE Senior Design Team Wins Expo Award

The 2nd Place Award for the 2015 Michigan Tech Design Expo was won by the ECE team: Front End Protection for Data Aquisition
Team Members: Sylvia Ferragut, Caleb Wright, and Ben Veltman, Electrical Engineering; Matthew Zawisza, Computer Engineering
Advisor: Duane Bucheger, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Sponsor: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Project Overview: Often devices under test can behave in erratic ways, resulting in catastrophic damage to expensive test equipment. By designing specifications based on National Instruments’ limitations and typical automotive testing requirements, the team created a buffer box to protect from over-voltage and add layers of isolation. The buffer box, used in conjunction with the $50k–$500k tools being regularly used by the automotive industry, is a simple tool, which can be used by a wide range of people with varying levels of expertise to keep expenses down.

Team Members Sylvia Ferragut, Caleb Wright, and Ben Veltman, Electrical Engineering; Matthew Zawisza, Computer Engineering Advisor Duane Bucheger, Electrical and Computer Engineering Sponsor Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Team Members: Sylvia Ferragut, Caleb Wright, and Ben Veltman, Electrical Engineering; Matthew Zawisza, Computer Engineering
Advisor: Duane Bucheger, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Sponsor: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

View a Video about Michigan Tech: Front End Protection for Data Acquisition on Michigan Tech Expo Channel on Youtube

View a Video about the award winning ECE team on Michigan Tech Expo Channel on Youtube
View a Video about the award winning ECE team on Michigan Tech Expo Channel on Youtube

When the Design Expo 2015 Image Contest winners were announced, Robotics Systems Enterprise 216 team won second place for its image of ECE student Kealy Smith working on an Afraid-of-the-Dark bot. The team is sponsored by ArcelorMittal and 205 (Blue Marble Enterprise) team entry won 3rd Place.

See the Design Expo Summary Report with links to more articles and pictures

ECE Anounces 2014 Department Awards

Maria Damiani, ECE 2014 Departmental Scholar

The 2014 ECE Department Awards banquet was held on Thursday, April 17, 2014 in the Memorial Union Building Ballroom on the Michigan Tech campus. The banquet is held each spring to honor ECE students and senior design and enterprise teams. It is also a time to recognize those who have gone above and beyond in their contributions to academics and the community. This year the ECE department was proud to present the following student awards.

– ECE Departmental Scholar: Maria Damiani

– ECE Woman of Promise: Myder Vang

– Carl J. Schjonberg Outstanding Undergraduate Student: Chen Li

– Jonathan Bara Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant: Marco La Manna

As part of the ECE’s External Advisory Committee (EAC) Spring 2014 agenda, the members observed the department’s senior design and enterprise team presentations and poster displays to select a team from each group that best meets or exceeds their specific criteria related to today’s industry needs. This year’s EAC Industry Innovation Award went to Senior Design Team 1 for their project “Transmission System Guidelines for Line Commutated Motor Starting” sponsored by American Transmission Company (ATC), advisor Trever Hassell. SD-1 team members: Connor Dziubinski, Jon Hohol, Andrew Martin, and Daniel Parent. Blue Marble Security team “Blood Typing Device”, sponsored by Dr. Adrienne Minerick, Chemical Engineering, advisor Dr. Glen Archer, was selected from the enterprise teams. BMS-1 team members: Korbin Bickel, Gerry Chan, Matthew Gruber, Eman Jazayeri, and Mike Switala.

For more details see ECE Student Awards.

For the second consecutive year, Prof. Kit Cischke was named Professor of the Year by the Eta Kappa Nu (HKN) Honor Society.

Myder Vang, ECE 2014 Woman of Promise

Chen Li, Carl J. Schjonberg Outstanding ECE Undergraduate Student

Marco La Manna, Jonathan Bara Outstanding ECE Graduate Teaching Assistant

EAC Industry Innovation Award: Senior Design Team 1: Connor Dziubinski, Jon Hohol, Andrew Martin, and Daniel Parent

EAC Industry Innovation Award: Blue Marble Security Team "Blood Typing Device": Korbin Bickel, Gerri Chan, Matthew Gruber, Eman Jazayeri, and Mike Switala

Prof. Kit Cischke, HKN Professor of the Year, presented by Adam Funkenbusch